Octavia Butler Quotes
Collection of top 100 famous quotes about Octavia Butler
Octavia Butler Quotes & Sayings
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Here we are - Energy, Mass, Life, Shaping life, Mind, Shaping Mind, God, Shaping God. Consider - We are born Not with purpose, But with potential.
— Octavia E. Butler
There are so many interesting times we could have visited.
— Octavia E. Butler
Life is getting better, but that won't stop a war if politicians and business people decide it's to their advantage to have one.
— Octavia Butler
People do blame you for the things they do to you.
— Octavia E. Butler
Civilization is the way one's own people live. Savagery is the way foreigners live.
— Octavia E. Butler
Humans persecute their different ones, yet they need them to give themselves definition and status.
— Octavia Butler
My characters hope for better lives.
— Octavia E. Butler
Could a creature who had to look upon ordinary people literally as food and shelter ever understand how strongly those people valued life?
— Octavia E. Butler
Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself.
— Octavia E. Butler
Beware At war Or at peace, More people die Of unenlightened self-interest Than of any other disease
— Octavia Butler
I realized that I knew less about loneliness than I had thought - and much less than I would know when he went away.
— Octavia E. Butler
I learned that five- and-six-year-old kids have already figured out how to be intolerant.
— Octavia E. Butler
With a disaster like global warming, it's too late to worry about when it's looming except to figure out how to adapt to it.
— Octavia E. Butler
Most of us, if we're not careful, tend to dehumanize the enemy.
— Octavia E. Butler
There was no real comfort in being alone with her thoughts, her memories, but somehow the illusion of freedom lessened her despair.
— Octavia E. Butler
Twenty-five or thirty words are supposed to be enough in a news bullet to explain either a war or an unusual set of Christmas lights.
— Octavia E. Butler
Did she struggle for life only out of habit, or because some part of her still hoped that there was something worth living for?
— Octavia E. Butler
Kindness eases changeLove quiets fear — Octavia E. Butler
If vampires were a separate species, and they were into genetic engineering, what would they engineer for?
— Octavia E. Butler
I was raised Baptist, and I like the fact that I got my conscience installed early.
— Octavia Butler
Let go of me." It smoothed its tentacles again. "Be grateful, Joe. I'm not going to let go of you.
— Octavia E. Butler
Octavia Butler, of course, is brilliant and disturbing.
— Sarah Zettel
Slavery was a long slow process of dulling.
— Octavia E. Butler
Read every day and learn from what you read.
— Octavia E. Butler
Leave your sinful past behind, and become one of us. Help us to make America great again." He
— Octavia E. Butler
Prayers only help the person doing the praying, and then, only if they strengthen and focus that person's resolve.
— Octavia E. Butler
But my problem with fantasy, and horror, and related genres, is that sometimes the problems are illogical.
— Octavia Butler
I'm Valerie Rye,' she said, savoring the words. 'It's all right for you to talk to me.
— Octavia E. Butler
He was like me - a kindred spirit crazy enough to keep on trying.
— Octavia E. Butler
Getting your writing criticized can be a lot like getting skinned, and you respond to it just as enthusiastically.
— Octavia E. Butler
I pecked my stories out two-fingered on the Remington portable typewriter my mother had bought me. I had begged for it when I was ten.
— Octavia E. Butler
You are a good man," she had observed contentedly. "And it has been too long since I had this." He was surprised
— Octavia E. Butler
People have the right to call themselves whatever they like. That doesn't bother me. It's other people doing the calling that bothers me.
— Octavia E. Butler
I'm a pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist, a Black, ... an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive.
— Octavia E. Butler
The Dunns must of felt this when Tracy vanished. Crazy as they are, crazy as she was, they must
— Octavia E. Butler
She glanced at him. "What gods do you respect?" "None." "And why not?" "I help myself," he said.
— Octavia E. Butler
Bloodchild" is my pregnant man story.
— Octavia E. Butler
I had novels to write, so I wrote them.
— Octavia E. Butler
She jumps on me for sharing pain with the living, but she tries to share it with the dead.
— Octavia E. Butler
Once you grow past Mommy and Daddy coming running when you're hurt, you're really on your own. You're alone, and there's no one to help you.
— Octavia Butler
I began reading science fiction before I was 12 and started writing science fiction around the same time.
— Octavia Butler
Writing is one of the few professions in which you can psychoanalyse yourself, get rid of hostilities and frustrations in public, and get paid for it.
— Octavia Butler
We're all capable of climbing so much higher than we usually permit ourselves to suppose.
— Octavia Butler
No ... a novel is a long business. I'm a slow writer, even when I'm doing very well I write slowly.
— Octavia Butler
I would never have been a good scientist - my attention span was too short for that.
— Octavia Butler
I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.
— Octavia E. Butler
I'm me, and I'm here, and I'm writing,
— Octavia Butler
I'm a fifty-three-year-old writer who can remember being a ten-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an eighty-year-old writer.
— Octavia E. Butler
Science fiction frees you to go anyplace and examine anything.
— Octavia E. Butler
As a kind of castaway myself, I was happy to escape into the fictional world of someone else's trouble.
— Octavia E. Butler
Slavery is a long slow process of dulling.
— Octavia Butler
Delusional pain hurts just as much as pain from actual trauma. So what if it's all in your head?
— Octavia E. Butler
Hollywood wants to go for the flash, because that's what a lot of them think science fiction is.
— Octavia E. Butler
Writing has been as difficult for me as for people who don't like to write and as little fun.
— Octavia E. Butler
And by the way, I wanted to point out that Kindred is not science fiction. You'll note there's no science in it. It's a kind of grim fantasy.
— Octavia Butler
I have this theory that anything that happens to you that leaves you alive and intact can be used somewhere in your writing.
— Octavia Butler
A tree Cannot grow In its parents' shadows.
— Octavia Butler
why can't I do what others have done - ignore the obvious. Live a normal life. It's hard enough just to do that in this world.
— Octavia E. Butler
The destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars.
— Octavia Butler
Would you like a tuna-salad sandwich?''Yes,' God said. 'Thank you. — Octavia E. Butler
Worship is no good without action. With action, it's only useful if it steadies you, focuses your efforts, and eases your mind
— Octavia E. Butler
Science fiction is not formulaic.
— Octavia E. Butler
We give lip service to acceptance, as though acceptance were enough.
— Octavia E. Butler
Religion is a dangerous prod, because it can always be misused and get out of hand, but it's useful for keeping people on the straight and narrow.
— Octavia Butler
She learned quickly that it was not good to be too different. Great differences caused envy, suspicion, fear, charges of witchcraft.
— Octavia E. Butler
I wanted to write a novel that would make others feel the history: the pain and fear that black people have had to live through in order to endure.
— Octavia E. Butler
I'm very happy alone.
— Octavia E. Butler
You are horror and beauty in rare combination.
— Octavia Butler
Shyness is shit. It isn't cute or feminine or appealing. It's torment, and it's shit.
— Octavia E. Butler
When it comes to strangers with guns," I told her, "I think suspicion is more likely to keep you alive than trust." She
— Octavia E. Butler
You controlled both animals and people by controlling their reproduction - controlling it absolutely.
— Octavia E. Butler
Gather information. Seek weakness. Watch, wait, and do what you have to to stay alive!
— Octavia E. Butler
Daddy's the only man I know," he said softly, "who cares as much about giving his word to a black as to a white.
— Octavia E. Butler
I can write my own stories and I can write myself in.
— Octavia Butler
There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.
— Octavia E. Butler
I'm sorry that astronaut will be brought back from her own chosen heaven.
— Octavia E. Butler
The thing about science fiction is that it's totally wide open. But it's wide open in a conditional way.
— Octavia Butler
I don't write about good and evil with this enormous dichotomy. I write about people. I write about people doing the kinds of things that people do.
— Octavia E. Butler
Sensible. Conservative and sensible and mature and *wrong*. Very much in character with Joanne.
— Octavia E. Butler
Helpless lust and unreasoning anxiety were just part of growing up.
— Octavia Butler
There is no power in having strength and brains, and yet waiting for God to fix things for you or take revenge for you.
— Octavia E. Butler
The big talent is persistence.
— Octavia E. Butler
My God doesn't love me or hate me or watch over me or know me at all, and I feel no love for or loyalty to my God. My God just is.
— Octavia E. Butler
I used to give up writing like some people would give up smoking.
— Octavia E. Butler
We are a naturally hierarchical species.
— Octavia E. Butler
Yes," he said, "intelligence does enable you to deny facts you dislike. But your denial doesn't matter.
— Octavia E. Butler
I don't know how much of a market there is for space opera. Just because it's in the movies doesn't mean magazines are buying it.
— Octavia E. Butler
I think people really need to think what it's like to have all of society arrayed against you.
— Octavia E. Butler
We can,Each of us,
Do the impossible
As long as we can convince ourselves
That it has been done before. — Octavia E. Butler
To get along with God,Consider the consequences of your behavior.
Earthseed: The Books of the Living — Octavia E. Butler
Your people contain incredible potential, but they die without using much of it.
— Octavia E. Butler
When your rage is choking you, it is best to say nothing.
— Octavia E. Butler
How dull it is to have people defining you.
— Octavia E. Butler
Octavia Butler was more interested in writing a good story than in worrying about where to slot it.
— Karen Joy Fowler
Listen, no part of me is more definitive of who I am than my brain.
— Octavia E. Butler
The only lasting truth is change. God is change.
— Octavia Butler
